Protecting users from themselves can be a misfeature. Its better to educate and then let them freely choose than to play as their nanny.
On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 19:25:22 +0200 Cedric Sodhi <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:33:20AM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > > On Thu, 2023-01-19 at 13:25 +0200, Cedric Sodhi wrote: > > > In this case, the expectation to compile manpages does not come > > > free of cost and protects noone. By the above formulation, the > > > cost "should" not come in the form of additional (heavy! > > > dev-python/sphinx and deps are 75M) dependencies, but instead in > > > the form of additional work for the maintainer. One way to annoy > > > less-enthusiastic (proxy-) maintainers, in my opinion. > > > > I think "protects noone" is overstating it. If your network is > > broken, the man pages might be your only troubleshooting resource. > > It would suck to find that (say) net-wireless/iwd introduced a new > > USE=man flag a few weeks ago and now you can't get connected to > > some weird conference wifi and are unable to google for help. > > Fair enough, "protects noone" was not perfectly correct. > > But is the improbable combination of > > P( the user should have been protected ) = > P( user accidentally/mistakenly specifies USE=-man ) > × P( the manpage's availability circularly depends on itself ) > × P( the user has no other access to the manpage ) > × P( the maintainer did not recognize the sitation and disabled > "man" ) × P( the user ends up in that situation ) > × P( the user is a reasonable user who deserves to be protected (!) ) > > really worth generalizing it as a "ALL packages MUST NEVER … ! "? > > I think a far more agreeable approach which does justice to > > The likelihood of the case that forcing manpages actually saves > someone AND The likelihood of the case that it causes problems (by > dependencies for the user, or by additional work for the maintainer) > > is to remind maintainers of it, but live-and-let-live, i.e. let > maintainers do their job without imposing a policy. I wouldn't know > of anyone who would have had a problem with this in the past and I > don't think anyone will exclaim "Gosh, if just we have had a > policy...!" in the future. >
